Social networking in the Philippines

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Social networking is one of the most active web-based activities in the Philippines, with Filipinos being declared as the most active users on a number of web-based social network sites such asFriendster, Facebook, Multiply, Twitter, Budflick, Hikot- The Filipino Social Network, PinoyKubo PinoyKubo - Taas noo Pinoy, Tayotayolang tayotayolang.com - Lakas Pinoy, iCubeeicubee.com - Share your Mobile Life and Pysoldev - A business and professional networking. The use of social networking website has become so extensive in the Philippines that the country has been tagged as "The Social Networking Capital of the World," and has also become part of Filipino cyberculture. Social networking is also used in the Philippines as a form of election campaign material, as well as tools to aid criminal investigation.

[edit]History

Friendster is one of the first social networking websites in the World Wide Web when it was introduced in 2002. However, its popularity in the United States plummeted quickly in 2004 due to massive technical problems and server delays.[1] But as it was losing its American audience, Friendster slowly gained users from Southeast Asia starting in the Philippines. Friendster director of engineering Chris Lunt wondered why its web traffic was spiking in the middle of the night, and noticed that the traffic was coming from the Philippines. He then traced the trail to a Filipino-American marketing consultant and hypnotist named Carmen Leilani de Jesus as the first user to have introduced Friendster to the Philippines, where a number of her friends live.[2]
[edit]Statistics

A study released by Universal McCann entitled "Power To The People - Wave3" declared the Philippines as "the social networking capital of the world," with 83 percent of Filipinos surveyed are members of a social network. They are also regarded as the top photo uploaders and web video viewers, while they are second when it comes to the number of blog readers and video uploaders.[3][4] With over 7.9 million Filipinos using the Internet, 6.9 million of them visit a social networking site at least once a month.[5] At times, Friendster has been the most visited website in the Philippines, as well as in Indonesia, according to web tracking site Alexa.[6] David Jones, vice president for global marketing of Friendster, said that "the biggest percentage of (their site's) users is from the Philippines, clocking in with 39 percent of the site's traffic." He further added

that in March 2008 alone, Friendster recorded 39 million unique visitors, with 13.2 million of whom were from the Philippines.[7]Meanwhile, Multiply president and founder Peter Pezaris said that the Filipino users of their site comprised the largest and most active group in terms of number of subscribers and of photographs being uploaded daily. About 2.2 million out of more than nine million registered users of Multiply are Filipinos, outnumbering even nationalities with a bigger population base like the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil. Also, one million photographs are uploaded by Filipinos to Multiply every day, which is half of their total number worldwide.[7] Sixty percent of Filipino users of Multiply are female, while 70 percent are under the age of 25. In comparison, Filipino Friendster users are between the ages 16 to 30, with 55 percent of them female.[7]
[edit]Expansions

in the Philippine market

With the popularity of social networking in the Philippines, Friendster and Multiply thought of ways to capitalize the local market. The former concluded that online advertising would not work in a country with limited Internet access, and instead focused on the developing services based on mobile phones which is much more widespread, starting with providing free phone calls between members as well as a mobile phone text messaging service to its Filipino users.[8] It also experimented on online classifieds with Pusit.[9] Meanwhile, Multiply launched its Philippine version. Multiply Philippines is developed in partnership with ABS-CBN Interactive to grow its user base in the country, as well as tapping into its local advertising and mobile services.[10]
[edit]Application

in Filipino culture and society

The popularity of social networking in the Philippines can be traced in the Filipinos' culture of "friends helping friends." For Filipinos, their friends and who they know can become more valuable than money, especially when what they need can be achieved through nepotism, favoritism, and friendship among others.[2] Social networking has extensive uses in the Philippines. It was used to promote television programs like Pinoy Big Brother: Teen Edition Plus with its two profiles on Multiply. A call center company posted job openings on its Multiply community site and was able to attract recruits.[10] The power of social networking was tested in the country's 2007 general elections when senatorial candidateFrancis Escudero created his own Friendster profile to bolster support from Filipino users.[11] He eventually won a seat in the Senate.[2] Local celebrities and politicians have since created their own profiles on Friendster as their medium to communicate with their fans and constituents.[12]

Friendster was also used as a tool for police investigations. Local police in Cebu City where able to track down the suspects for the robbery and murder of a female nursing student on March 2008. After receiving information and tips from the public and other police operatives, the local police searched through the suspects' profiles in order to get a closer look at their faces. The police printed the pictures of the suspects and launched a series of police operations, which led to their arrest.[13] Meanwhile, Manila Police District arrested a suspect for the murder of two guest relations officers inTondo on January 2007 after they were able to find the suspect's whereabouts through his Friendster profile.[14] Social networks also became a source of high-profile cyberwars, notably between actors Ynez Veneracion and Mon Confiado against Juliana Palermo. The two accused Palermo of creating a fake Friendster profile of her ex-boyfriend Confiado, which is uploaded with photos of Confiado and his girlfriend Veneracion but laden with profanities in each caption.[15]
[edit]Criticism

Filipino-American Internet personality Christine Gambito, also known as HappySlip, criticized Friendster for displaying what she described as "inappropriate advertisements" that appear on her profile. She posted a message on the site's bulletin board addressing her fans that she contemplated deleting her account. Gambito had earlier deleted her MySpace account because she objected to theGoogle-powered online advertisements that she said "were in direct conflict with the HappySlip brand and especially misrepresentative of Filipino women." She particularly criticized the posting of advertisements of international dating websites that supposedly target Filipinas.[16] Meanwhile, Philippine National Police Director General Avelino Razon ordered the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group to find out who created a fake account on Friendster using his identity. The profile was laden with false information about him, saying that he "wants to meet traitors, corrupts, criminals so he could crush them."[17] As of December 2008, there have been cases of spam comments in Friendster profiles, most of which are in the form of a JPEG image masquerading as an embedded YouTube video, with a thumbnail of a sexually explicit video clip, such as a girl undressing herself or something similar. Clicking on the image usually results in a redirect to a dubious or disreputable website, or worse, a drive-by download of malware, such as the Koobface worm. Because some of the users, especially teenagers, who usually log on to the site in an Internet cafe, have only limited knowledge about malware and/or computers in general, such social engineering attacks can be a significant risk. The site had received considerable criticism due to this issue.[18][19][20]
[edit]

Social networking is one of the most active web-based activities in the Philippines, with Filipinos being declared as the most active users on a number of web-based social network sites such asFriendster, Facebook, Multiply, Twitter, Budflick, Hikot- The Filipino Social Network, PinoyKubo PinoyKubo - Taas noo Pinoy, Tayotayolang tayotayolang.com - Lakas Pinoy, iCubeeicubee.com - Share your Mobile Life and Pysoldev - A business and professional networking. The use of social networking website has become so extensive in the Philippines that the country has been tagged as "The Social Networking Capital of the World," and has also become part of Filipino cyberculture. Social networking is also used in the Philippines as a form of election campaign material, as well as tools to aid criminal investigation.

History
Friendster is one of the first social networking websites in the World Wide Web when it was introduced in 2002. However, its popularity in the United States plummeted quickly in 2004 due to massive technical problems and server delays.[1] But as it was losing its American audience, Friendster slowly gained users from Southeast Asia starting in the Philippines. Friendster director of engineering Chris Lunt wondered why its web traffic was spiking in the middle of the night, and noticed that the traffic was coming from the Philippines. He then traced the trail to a Filipino-American marketing consultant and hypnotist named Carmen Leilani de Jesus as the first user to have introduced Friendster to the Philippines, where a number of her friends live.[2] [edit]Statistics A study released by Universal McCann entitled "Power To The People - Wave3" declared the Philippines as "the social networking capital of the world," with 83 percent of Filipinos surveyed are members of a social network. They are also regarded as the top photo uploaders and web video viewers, while they are second when it comes to the number of blog readers and video uploaders.[3][4] With over 7.9 million Filipinos using the Internet, 6.9 million of them visit a social networking site at least once a month.[5] At times, Friendster has been the most visited website in the Philippines, as well as in Indonesia, according to web tracking site Alexa.[6] David Jones, vice president for global marketing of Friendster, said that "the biggest percentage of (their site's) users is from the Philippines, clocking in with 39 percent of the site's traffic." He

further added that in March 2008 alone, Friendster recorded 39 million unique visitors, with 13.2 million of whom were from the Philippines.[7]Meanwhile, Multiply president and founder Peter Pezaris said that the Filipino users of their site comprised the largest and most active group in terms of number of subscribers and of photographs being uploaded daily. About 2.2 million out of more than nine million registered users of Multiply are Filipinos, outnumbering even nationalities with a bigger population base like the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil. Also, one million photographs are uploaded by Filipinos to Multiply every day, which is half of their total number worldwide.[7] Sixty percent of Filipino users of Multiply are female, while 70 percent are under the age of 25. In comparison, Filipino Friendster users are between the ages 16 to 30, with 55 percent of them female.[7] [edit]Expansions

in the Philippine market

With the popularity of social networking in the Philippines, Friendster and Multiply thought of ways to capitalize the local market. The former concluded that online advertising would not work in a country with limited Internet access, and instead focused on the developing services based on mobile phones which is much more widespread, starting with providing free phone calls between members as well as a mobile phone text messaging service to its Filipino users.[8] It also experimented on online classifieds with Pusit.[9] Meanwhile, Multiply launched its Philippine version. Multiply Philippines is developed in partnership with ABSCBN Interactive to grow its user base in the country, as well as tapping into its local advertising and mobile services.[10] [edit]Application

in Filipino culture and society

The popularity of social networking in the Philippines can be traced in the Filipinos' culture of "friends helping friends." For Filipinos, their friends and who they know can become more valuable than money, especially when what they need can be achieved through nepotism, favoritism, and friendship among others.[2] Social networking has extensive uses in the Philippines. It was used to promote television programs like Pinoy Big Brother: Teen Edition Plus with its two profiles on Multiply. A call center company posted job openings on its Multiply community site and was able to attract recruits.[10] The power of social networking was tested in the country's 2007 general elections when senatorial candidateFrancis Escudero created his own Friendster profile to bolster support from Filipino users.[11] He eventually won a seat in the Senate.[2] Local

celebrities and politicians have since created their own profiles on Friendster as their medium to communicate with their fans and constituents.[12] Friendster was also used as a tool for police investigations. Local police in Cebu City where able to track down the suspects for the robbery and murder of a female nursing student on March 2008. After receiving information and tips from the public and other police operatives, the local police searched through the suspects' profiles in order to get a closer look at their faces. The police printed the pictures of the suspects and launched a series of police operations, which led to their arrest.[13] Meanwhile, Manila Police District arrested a suspect for the murder of two guest relations officers inTondo on January 2007 after they were able to find the suspect's whereabouts through his Friendster profile.[14] Social networks also became a source of high-profile cyberwars, notably between actors Ynez Veneracion and Mon Confiado against Juliana Palermo. The two accused Palermo of creating a fake Friendster profile of her ex-boyfriend Confiado, which is uploaded with photos of Confiado and his girlfriend Veneracion but laden with profanities in each caption.[15] [edit]Criticism Filipino-American Internet personality Christine Gambito, also known as HappySlip, criticized Friendster for displaying what she described as "inappropriate advertisements" that appear on her profile. She posted a message on the site's bulletin board addressing her fans that she contemplated deleting her account. Gambito had earlier deleted her MySpace account because she objected to theGoogle-powered online advertisements that she said "were in direct conflict with the HappySlip brand and especially misrepresentative of Filipino women." She particularly criticized the posting of advertisements of international dating websites that supposedly target Filipinas.[16] Meanwhile, Philippine National Police Director General Avelino Razon ordered the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group to find out who created a fake account on Friendster using his identity. The profile was laden with false information about him, saying that he "wants to meet traitors, corrupts, criminals so he could crush them."[17] As of December 2008, there have been cases of spam comments in Friendster profiles, most of which are in the form of a JPEG image masquerading as an embedded YouTube video, with a thumbnail of a sexually explicit video clip, such as a girl undressing herself or something similar. Clicking on the image usually results in a redirect to a dubious or disreputable website, or worse, a drive-by download of malware, such as

the Koobface worm. Because some of the users, especially teenagers, who usually log on to the site in an Internet cafe, have only limited knowledge about malware and/or computers in general, such social engineering attacks can be a significant risk. The site had received considerable criticism due to this issue.[18][19][20] [edit]New

Campaign

On July 2011, GMA Network creates the new campaign "Think Before You Click - a campaign by GMA News to promote responsible use of social media. [edit]Footnotes
1. ^ Rivlin, Gary (October 15, 2006). "Wallflower at the Web Party". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-06-24. 2. ^ a b c "Orkut, Friendster Get Second Chance Overseas". PBS.org. June 15, 2007. Retrieved 2008-06-22. 3. ^ "Power To The People: Social Media Tracker, Wave3". Universal McCann. March 2008. Retrieved 2008-06-22.[dead link] 4. ^ Liao, Jerry (May 20, 2008). "The Philippines - Social Networking Capital of the World". Manila Bulletin. Retrieved 2008-06-23.[dead link] 5. ^ Yazon, Giovanni Paolo (March 31, 2007). "Social networking to the higher level". Manila Standard Today. Retrieved 2008-06-23. 6. ^ Ling, Woo Liu (January 29, 2008). "Friendster Moves to Asia". Time.com. Retrieved 200806-23. 7. ^ a b c Salazar, Tessa (June 22, 2008). "Filipinos are prolific, go and Multiply". Philippine Daily Inquirer. pp. A1, A10. Retrieved 2008-06-23. 8. ^ Ong, Edison D (November 28, 2004). "Internet's hot sites Friendster, e-Bay test market in Philippines". Manila Bulletin. Retrieved 2008-06-23.[dead link] 9. ^ Glasner, Joanna (March 31, 2005). "We're a Hit in Manila! Now What?". Wired.com. Retrieved 2008-06-23. 10. ^ a b Dizon, David (June 19, 2005). "Filipinos are top Multiply users". ABS-CBNNews.com. Retrieved 2008-06-23.[dead link] 11. ^ "Chiz Escudero campaigns in cyberspace". Manila Bulletin. February 26, 2007. Retrieved 2008-06-24.[dead link] 12. ^ Marinay, Manny B. (January 31, 2009). "Stars use Friendster's Fan Profiles to reach out to fans". Manila Bulletin. Retrieved 2008-06-24.[dead link]

13. ^ Mosqueda, Mars Jr. W (March 11, 2008). "Internet used to identify killers of nursing student". Manila Bulletin. Retrieved 2008-06-24.[dead link] 14. ^ Malayo, Natalie Jane M (January 16, 2007). "Suspect in killing of two GROs arrested". Manila Bulletin. Retrieved 2008-06-24.[dead link] 15. ^ Sadiri, Walden (June 3, 2007). "Ynez-Juliana feud turns Friendster to "Hatester?"". Manila Bulletin. Retrieved 2008-06-24.[dead link] 16. ^ Oliva, Erwin (June 13, 2008). "Happy Slip unhappy with "inappropriate" ads on Friendster". Philippine Daily Inquirer. Retrieved 2008-06-24. 17. ^ Alberto, Thea (January 17, 2008). "Razon not amused by "Friendster account"". Philippine Daily Inquirer. Retrieved 2008-06-24.

2. Gartner Inc., an information technology intelligence company, recently said that their studies show that the Philippines is leading in the adoption of global social media sites like Facebook and Twitter in Asia. This confirms the study recently released by ComScore as well which ranked the Philippines as one of the top social media hubs in the region. 3. Before we all get excited we have to take a closer look at the study. The same report showed that most of the major countries in Asia Pacific didnt really buy into Facebook and Twitter immediately mainly because they have their own customized social networking services that are localized to their respective dialects. Also we have to take into consideration the rise of niche networking sites in Japan, China, and South Korea that are centered on online gaming. India also has popular dating and match-making websites. However I wouldnt be surprised if Twitter and Facebook gain more popularity in the next few months since most of the localized social networks arent 100% free. 4. This makes you wonder though if there is room for a localized Filipino social network here in our country. While the answer is probably yes, I dont think theres a dedicated IT and marketing group here that can push a noncommercialized local social network. SMART tried with Sandbox but it just failed miserably because it was just a mix of random features and it was too branded making it feel to invasive and profit oriented. 5. References: RP has most avid users of Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter in Asia -Gartner study RP highest in social networking engagement across Asia-Pacific

6.

David Beer is Senior Lecturer and Head of Programme for Communication in the Faculty of Business & Communication at York St John University. He has written a number of chapters and articles on digital culture, and particularly digital music culture. His book New Media: The
Key Concepts, co-authored with Nick Gane, is due to be published by Berg in 2008.

7. Introduction
8. In a recent issue of this journal danah boyd and Nicole Ellison (2007) guest edited a special section dedicated to what they refer to as social network sites or SNS. As we know, these types of web applications have already moved into the cultural mainstream (see Keen, 2007a), yet so far they have received little in the way of sustained analytical attention. Although, it is worth noting that there is a burgeoning academic interest in this phenomenon, exemplified by the kinds of discussions taking place on email groups like that hosted by the Association of Internet Researchers. This special section represents the beginning of what is sure to be a lively and varied engagement with these nascent developments in online cultures. Colleagues will no doubt be aware of a flurry of academic activity that has already started in the wake of the rise of these highly popular online phenomena. It is for this reason that we are at a crucial moment in the development of this field of study, it is at this moment that the parameters and scope of the debate are set and when we begin to set agendas that may well become established and shape how we study and understand SNS. This article is intended to be provocative and, it is hoped, it will open up some of these debates and questions relating to the direction in which the study of SNS seems to be heading. In order to do this I focus this response on the specifics of boyd and

Ellisons (2007) essay Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship. This is likely to
become a highly referenced article that could well shape these emerging debates, for this reason their article requires some attention before the dust settles on the path forward. 9. It is worth noting from the outset that boyd and Ellison, who have rapidly become leading names in this area of study, deserve credit for bringing together this special issue and for laying the foundations for continued work in this area. They are in fact operating at the cutting edge of what is going on, with boyds website www.danah.org forming an informational hub for many researchers and students. Indeed, the article that they have co-authored to open this special section, to which this article is a response, does a great deal of work to clarify the boundaries of study and to provide an overview of the story so far. In so doing it draws together a number of loose and disconnected strands of work on SNS. In addition to this, perhaps most credit should be given for their attempts to construct a history of SNS, the resulting timeline is highly usable and highlights just how quickly these things are moving into everyday life (and even falling out again in the case of Friendster). Equal acknowledgement should be given for their attempt to

define some of the ways in which we might move forward with our analysis of SNS although, as I point out later, I do not entirely agree with the directions they intimate or the premise on which these intimations are based. 10. So, this article then is written as a response to boyd and Ellisons defining essay on social network sites, and, as such, it represents an attempt to instigate further cross-pollination in the study of SNS by revisiting and engaging with the vision that boyd and Ellison construct. I do not attempt to re-write the history that they develop in the article, instead I focus here upon the definition of SNS that they advocate, upon the theory that seems to underpin the article, and, informed by these, upon reconsidering the way forward that the authors suggest we take.

11.

Definition revisited

12. It is no surprise that one of the key problems facing work into what are quite rapidly shifting contemporary online cultures concerns the types of definitions we use to understand what is happening and to classify different types of web applications. The difficulty is in giving some clarity to the terminology where the things we refer to are mobile and where the terminology is used so widely to describe so many different things and to service so many different agendas. Somewhat inevitably we have seen a range of terms used to describe what is going on in online culture as journalists, bloggers, media commentators, and academics have tried to get to grips with these shifts. Boyd and Ellisons suggestion is that the term social network sites is crucial in capturing these shifts. As the following passage illustrates: 13. We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site. 14. (boyd & Ellison, 2007: 2) 15. In an attempt to further clarify this definition boyd and Ellison carefully separate social networking sites, often the preferred vernacular term, from social network sites. They offer the following explanation for this distinction: 16. While we use the term social network site to describe this phenomenon, the term social networking site also appears in public discourse, and the two terms are often used interchangeably. We chose not to employ the term networking for two reasons: emphasis and scope. Networking emphasizes relationship initiation, often between strangers. While

networking is possible on these sites, it is not the primary practice on many of them, nor is it what differentiates them from other forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC). 17. (boyd & Ellison, 2007: 2) 18. We begin to see here the authors developing a vision of these sites not as spaces where users are solely preoccupied with forming networks around themselves but where they involve themselves primarily in other activities, thus, for boyd and Ellison, the term networking is misleading in this regard. For them, networking can only refer to particular set of these sites and not to the range of site to which the authors would like it to refer, so by using network in its place the authors feel they can open up the scope of the discussion and the type of sites to which this discussion might refer. 19. My argument here would be that given these rapid cultural shifts and the dynamic and disjointed nature of much contemporary online culture there is a pressing need to classify in order to work toward a more descriptive analysis. As we can see in the above definition, social network sites as used by boyd and Ellison, stands for something quite broad. Whereas the term social networking sites describes something particular, a set of applications where, to a certain extent, networking is the main preoccupation. In short, the motivation to form expanding networks, the practice of networking as described by boyd and Ellison, that defines social networking sites should be the grounds for separating out different types of site (along with other established differences). It seems a shame to adjust our classifications so that they no longer account for this nuance. 20. Social networking sites, in the narrower sense, can then be differentiated from other related but different web applications like Youtube, where, picking up on boyd and Ellisons own argument, making and accumulating friendship connections is not the sole focus of activity. Youtube could be categorised as a folksonomy for instance. The difficulty that boyd and Ellisons use of the term social network sites creates is that it becomes too broad, it stands in for too many things, it is intended to do too much of the analytical work, and therefore makes a differentiated typology of these various user-generated web applications more problematic. So where we might group a series of different applications such as wikis, folksonomies, mashups and social networking sites maybe under a broader umbrella term like Web 2.0 (see Beer & Burrows, 2007; OReilly,

2005) we are instead faced with thinking of a vast range of often quite different applications
simply as social network sites. Although, it is clear that there is a great deal of overlap between categories relating to how these various types of site are organised and the information they contain common aspects like tagging, profiles, and friending illustrate the complexity of the similarities and differences between these types of site. My argument here is simply that we

should be moving toward more differentiated classifications of the new online cultures not away from them. boyd and Ellison themselves point out that these emerging user-generated led sites have a number of shared features and some important differences. I agree that a number of these sites arent about networking but are networks, but this should be grounds for distinction not for opening up a relatively stable term to include these differences. Having said this, it is possible that social network sites might become the new umbrella term, in place of usergenerated content or Web 2.0 or me media or the like, and that we may be able to find a new typology to sit within it. My problem with leaving things as they stand in boyd and Ellisons article is that I am not sure what a shift to their definition of social network sites actually achieves in terms of analytical value. As I read it, it could actually make the terrain more difficult to deal with as the number of sites that fit this broadly defined category continues to grow as we open-up the parameters of its definition and as the range of sites on the market continues to expand .
1

21. It makes sense to try to come up with a term that captures a broad sense of what is happening in online cultures, this is much needed, but it seems to me that mutating social network sites to do this job may actually create problems. My question here then is why not stick with the vernacular terminology, social networking site, which is more differentiated and descriptive of the processes, rather than moving toward this re-definition forwarded in boyd and Ellisons article? And, crucially, in addition to this, why not place SNS (whether network or networking) into a broader more nuanced typology of contemporary online cultures or web applications? This has been done elsewhere using the admittedly problematic and dubious Web 2.0 as an umbrella term or sensitising concept used to describe some general shifts toward user-generated content and toward the webtop in place of the single device (Beer & Burrows, 2007). Using an umbrella term like Web 2.0 allows for a series of categories to be fitted within it. In short, my suggestion is that in place of a very general vision of these sites as social network sites, why not use a term like Web 2.0 to describe the general shift and then fit categories, such as wikis, folksonomies, mashups and social networking sites within it.
22.

23.

Theory revisited

24. As a second issue I think it is also worth giving some consideration to the way that boyd and Ellison separate online and offline living an organisational premise that appears to underpin the way they approach SNS, how they have organised their piece, and where they say we might move in future research. Here everyday life is defined and organised by a mixture of these two things, with users having friends offline and Friends online ( boyd & Ellison, 2007: 14, note 1) for instance. The contention here being that Friends on SNSs are not the same as friends in the everyday sense (boyd cited in boyd & Ellison, 2007: 10). The problem is that increasingly, in

the context of SNS moving into the cultural mainstream, the everyday sense of friend can often be the SNS Friend. So what we are missing here is a sense of the recursive nature of these processes as SNS become mundane and as the version of friendship they offer begins to remediate and shape understandings of friendship more generally . So we cannot think of
2

friendship on SNS as entirely different and disconnected from our actual friends and notions of friendship, particularly as young people grow up and are informed by the connections they make on SNS. Where, as Lash puts it, forms of life become technological, as we see illustrated quite clearly by SNS, we make sense of the world through technological systems. (Lash, 2002: 15). We can imagine this as a recursive process where SNS come to challenge and possibly even mutate understandings of friendship. It is conceivable then that understandings and values of friendship may be altered by engagements with SNS. As time goes by and as young people spend longer with such technologies in their lives, so these types of recursive questions will need to find a place on the research agenda to make it clear I am not suggesting that this heralds the death of friendship or any such view, rather that we might need to engage with sociological studies of friendship (Pahl, 2000) to understand how friendship changes as it interfaces with such technologies. 25. In addition to this, as the authors claim elsewhere in the article in reference to another separate article by boyd, friends use SNS when they are unable to meet in unmediated situations (boyd cited in boyd & Ellison, 2007: 11). One of the growing problems here is that we often find that friends and Friends, as the authors inadvertently point out, can often be the same people. If this is the case, then how can it be profitable to separate out offline and online relations and spaces or online and offline forms of living in trying to understand SNS? 26. As Pahl has pointed out, and this remains unchanged, the challenge for sociologists is to be more specific about what they mean when they refer to friends, friend-like relations and friendship (Pahl, 2002: 421). The point is that if friendship must be seen in context (Pahl, 2002: 422) then it is essential that we begin to understand the role of friendship in forging the connections of SNS and, allied with this, begin to appraise the implications for friendship thrown up by the friendships of SNS. One option here would be to reassess or re-contextualise the typology of personal communities offered by Pahl and Spencer (2004: 210) in light of SNS. This would enable us to further develop understandings of how friendship changes in its meaning and function through the life-course (Pahl, 2000: 97) and how we are socially and culturally determined by our friends (Pahl, 2000: 172). Pahl has concluded that friendship is particularly important in the early stages of life, we need to consider this as a part of a shaping of notions of friendship, not think of understandings of friendship as being historically fixed or stable. In short, it is possible that SNS, as they become mainstream, might well have an influence on what friendship means, how it is understood, and, ultimately, how it is played out.

27. The way the authors deal with friendship fits with the more general approach taken in their article. They refer, for instance, to SNS as reflecting unmediated social structures ( boyd & Ellison,

2007: 9). The question here would be whether we can actually imagine a social structure or a
situation that goes unmediated. Indeed, we find that boyd and Ellisons article and its conclusions are defined by a determination to think of online and offline social relations as interwoven yet separate, a process that requires us to imagine that there are aspects of life that go unmediated. This, I would suggest, directs this and the future work they point toward in a particular direction. It represents a particular set of conceptual assumptions that may need to be questioned, particularly in light of how SNS operate in the everyday. 28. Separating out online from offline, even if we think of them as entwined ( boyd & Ellison, 2007: 13), seems to take us away from understanding these technologies as mundane and as a defining and integral part of how people live, especially as we open up this context to include not just user-generated content based web applications but mobile phones, PDAs, iPods, iPhones, laptops, RFID, MSN, digital cameras, wi-fi, smart dust, amongst a range of others (Hayles, 2006;

Beer, 2007; Crang & Graham, 2007) . These mobile, locative and integrated technologies lead
to an increasingly mediated way of life with little if any unmediated room outside. Lashs now widely cited claim is that the information order is inescapable and as such it gives us no longer an outside place to stand (Lash, 2002: xii). At issue here is the remediation (Graham, 2004a) or meditization (Lash, 2007a) of everyday life. As Nigel Thrift has put it, software has come to intervene in nearly all aspects of everyday life and has begun to sink into its taken-for-granted background. (Thrift, 2005: 153). This then is an alternative vision in which virtually all, if not all, aspects of our lives are mediated by software, often when and where we are not aware of it. 29. It is hard to think then of unmediated social structures or spaces for the very reason that applications like SNS are becoming so popular both becoming parts of the mundane and reporting on it for other users to consume. It is hard to think of a life offline, particularly for what appear to be the engaged and switched on youth (I acknowledge here that not everyone lives in this way and there are of course retro cultures and resistances). The point is that where these technologies are so mundane and integrated in how we live, why try to understand them by separating them out of our routines, how we live, how we connect with people and form relationships and so on. Im sure that this is not boyd and Ellisons goal, but the general concern with online and offline living pushes the analysis, and most importantly shapes the development of the nascent stages of study of SNS, in this direction. There is a chance that might come to overlook some of the crucial aspects of SNS concerning its already established and realised potential to be a mundane part of our lives and our everyday communication. Imagining aspects of SNS users lives outside of SNS, to give a comparative angle on things, is not the only way forward. Without wanting to sound Baudrillardian, we might even want to think if there is such a

thing as an online and an offline in the context of SNS. Perhaps one of the things that SNS reveal, in the way that they are integrated into the mundane ways people live and as they communicate mundane aspects of their lives to other users (in photos, status, views, activities, favourites, and so on), is that we need to consider other types of theoretical frameworks and the grounding premises that underpin them.
30.

31.

The future revisited

32. Finally, this leads us to the important question of what is missing and where we might go to next. The authors provide a useful and revealing insight into the work that has been published so far or that will be published over the coming months. To conclude Id like to take this, alongside boyd and Ellisons brief intimations toward future research, as a point of departure for doing two things, the first is to suggest what might be missing from this existing body of work , the second is to use
3

this to suggest some alternative ways forward to that imagined by boyd and Ellison. 33. boyd and Ellison suggest that so far we have a limited understanding of who is and who is not using these sites, why and for what purposes (boyd & Ellison, 2007: 14). Of course, this is true, we have little understanding of these things. This lack of knowledge is interesting given that SNS can be understood as vast archives of information about their users, accumulated as they create content, that answer exactly these questions (Gane & Beer, 2008). If we so wish, and given sufficient time, we can dip into these archives at will in order to answer these questions . Indeed,
4

we often see revealed in the activities of users of SNS a kind of sociological tendency (Beer &

Burrows, 2007) or a new culture of public research (Hardey & Burrows, 2008) as they routinely
engage in a kind of vernacular sociology (Beer & Burrows, 2007) as they research, classify and find about one another (and their cultural artefacts). As well as the everyday acts of finding out about other SNSers, ordinary users are also researching one another using the technologies themselves and even in some cases researching the particular details of each others SNS use. To illustrate this we can visit user generated software mashups that visualise the geography of user generated content such as posts on Twitter at http://www.twittervision.com/ or the edits and additions made to Wikipedia http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html . In this regard, as Hardey

& Burrows (2008) have pointed out, we already have ordinary users of SNS engaging in
answering the questions that boyd and Ellison highlight (see also Beer & Burrows, 2007). We
5

merely need to join in. We might then continue to find answers to these questions by learning not only about SNS users, but also by learning about their practices and incorporating them into our own. It is likely that some researchers, those that are SNS savvy, might already be doing this. For these people SNS are already a part of how they live and a part of how they research.

34. It seems to me that the more difficult and overlooked questions about SNS and other related Web 2.0 phenomena concern the cultural circuit of capitalism (Thrift, 2005) that underpins them in an age of what Thrift (2005) has called knowing capitalism (see also Beer, 2006; Beer & Burrows,

2007). This is where feedback loops establish that inform capitalism by drawing upon forms of
knowledge that have largely evaded the business sector. As one example of capitalisms use of new forms of knowledge, Thrift suggests that knowledges which are transmitted through gossip and small talk which often prove surprisingly important are able to be captured and made into opportunities for profit (Thrift, 2005: 6). If we take just this one example then we could imagine how valuable the content of SNS might be in a context of knowing capitalism, particularly as they are undoubtedly the site of wholesale engagement with gossip and small talk. And this is by no means the end of the list when it comes to valuable information sources that are readily accessible through SNS and the back-end SNS databases. We can see here how the information on free to access SNS can be of value in itself, or as Bruce Sterling has put it, my consumption patterns are worth so much that they underwrite my acts of consumption. ( Sterling, 2005: 79). The information that the SNS holds is of immense value in the context of a knowing capitalism, we need look no further than the valuation of these sites to see that. 35. We can, and probably should, think of SNS in this context. SNS are commercial spaces, even those that are free to access indeed, it is where they are free to access that we need to remind ourselves of this most frequently . This is illustrated by the recent developments at Facebook,
6

valued at $15bn, where the business model is being reconfigured to capture further profits from its established social networks with the development of social ads (van Duyn, 2007; Keen,

2007b). These social ads will be guided and targeted by information held about people and
connections they make with brands and products creating an automated advocacy through news feeds. By focusing solely upon the user, which is what boyd and Ellisons closing section on future research suggests, we are overlooking the software and concrete infrastructures, the capitalist organisations, the marketing and advertising rhetoric, the construction of these phenomena in various rhetorical agendas, the role of designers, metadata and algorithms, the role, access and conduct of third parties using SNS, amongst many other things. Scott Lash

(2006 & 2007a; Lash & Lury, 2007) for example has called for us to address these gaps in
knowledge through an engagement with software designers and those constructing brands and working-up algorithms. Or as Katherine Hayles has put it, information derives its efficacy from the material infrastructures it appears to obscure, understanding this should be the subject of inquiry, not a presupposition that inquiry takes for granted ( Hayles, 1999: 28). 36. So these questions about users and what they are doing are, of course, of real significance, but we should not ignore that there are other things going on inside and around SNS or even in the access and delivery of SNS as we see the launch of technologies like the iPod Touch and iPhone

and as we start to think of SNS as geographically located in the context of splintering urbanism, the capitalist urban infrastructure and the space-time mobilities of capitalism (Graham &

Marvin, 2001: 190-191) . It is important then that we do not perpetuate any amnesia about the
7

functioning of capitalism (Burrows, 2005: 464) in our analysis of SNS fuelled by the free to access and user generated nature of such sites. It seems to me, reflecting on the story so far presented by boyd and Ellison that this is a real danger. Capitalism is there, present, particularly in the history, but it is at risk of looming as a black box in understandings of SNS. It is necessary then that even where we are tempted by the way that social network(ing) sites are organised that we do not cultivate a context in which the functioning of capitalism has sunk into the background as a sort of analytic given with no or little explanatory sociological purchase. (Burrows, 2005: 466). At the moment we can see a direction emerging for the study of SNS in which capitalism becomes thisanalytic given, present in part in the descriptions, but remaining for the large part absent, especially in the analysis. 37. We can see, for instance, from the type of user focused research questions boyd and Ellison suggest that we could easily fall into this trap of sociological amnesia if we do not consider some of these other structural and pressing questions about SNS and the cultural circuits of

capitalism. It seems that it is the underlying functioning of capitalism on SNS, particularly in the
context of knowing capitalism (Thrift, 2005) where information about us is routinely harvested and used to inform, that is one of the key unanswered questions. George Ritzers (2007) work on the prosumer could be one example of work that attempts to bring capitalism to the surface in relation to SNS, particularly with regard to the changing nature of the relations between consumption and production that SNS afford. Indeed, within these questions of capitalism it will be necessary to think through a conceptualisation of consumption where we are faced with users taking an active and immanent part in creating or producing the content that they and others users are consuming. 38. With this issue in mind, and to return again to Thrift, SNS can be seen to capture the everydayness of the knowledge economy (Thrift, 2005: 3) as people exchange information, cultural artefacts, personal details, links to products and commodities, contacts, friends, and details about events and meetings. Indeed, the activities and interactions of MySpace and other SNS resonate with Thrifts observation that: 39. through the auspices of Internet and wireless technologies, consumers and producers now increasingly interact jointly to produce commodities, and, increasingly, commodities become objects that are being continuously developed (as is the case of, for example, various forms of software)more and more consumer objects are becoming part of an animate surface that is capable of conducting thought; thought is increasingly packaged in things.

40. (Thrift, 2005: 7) 41. The information produced through routine engagements with SNS is just as likely to inform business as our purchasing at a supermarket or our purchasing of an online book with the information being used to predict things about us, to find us out with recommendations, or even to discriminate between us as customers (see Turow, 2006). It is in this context of knowing

capitalism that we should now be imagining SNS. SNS, in line with new forms of commodity and
commodity relation described by Thrift, illustrate changes in the form of the commodity [that] point to the increasingly active role that the consumer is often expected to take. (Thrift, 2005: 7). Resonating with Thrifts vision of active consumers, informing capitalism and in turn being informed by the predictive powers that this informed capitalism develops, we can see in SNS consumers producing the commodities that draw people in frequently taking the form of the profile . We can think then of profiles as commodities both produced and consumed by those
8

engaged with SNS on other sites like Youtube it might be the video clip that is the draw with the profile operating behind it. We can see here, if we imagine SNS in this context, the active role of the consumer generating information and offering up information about themselves and their lives that feeds into this more knowledgeable capitalism ( Thrift, 2005: 21). 42. SNS then are a kind of transactional data set enriched by the types of previously hard to access, private and mundane aspects of everyday life that they communicate. Working through an understanding of SNS in the context of knowing capitalism might be one way of developing an agenda for studying SNS that provides insights that may complement and guide the empirical agenda. But we will not get a complete enough picture if we do not pay some attention to the details of the infrastructures, codes and organisations that are operating here or that feed off of SNS (as well as other consumer generated transactional data sources). Im being speculative here, but it does not take too great a stretch of the imagination to anticipate that SNS as commodities or collections of commodities are being used as data sources to inform organisations about their populations (Savage & Burrows, 2007). The richness and scope of information on SNS is likely to enable even more sophisticated acts of marketing discrimination (Turow, 2006) and differentiation between customers, and, as Joseph Turow (2006: 187) has suggested, it might even be that people using SNS and related profile based sites could well adapt to this and design their sites so that they are treated favourably in knowing capitalisms attempts to attract, favour and supplement particular types of people. We see here again, if we were still in any doubt, that the forms of classifications and sorting out made possible by information systems has and will continue to have profound consequences (Bowker & Star,

1999; Graham, 2004b; Burrows & Ellison, 2005).

43. As a parting thought, my feeling is that what is most urgent is a robust and sustained critique that challenges a number of the established and dominant visions that surround and facilitate the

movement into the mainstream of SNS (and Web 2.0 if you like). This is what is missing, a more political agenda that is more open to the workings of capitalism. At the moment we are informed largely by accounts of these as spaces where we can connect, spaces that are host to new or remediated social connections, spaces that are democratic and mutually owned the direction boyd and Ellison intimate and their focus solely upon the user looks to perpetuate this agenda even if unintentionally, at least, in my reading, that is the risk. My feeling is that the dominant visions of the democratisation of the web toward a model of collaborative or collective intelligence (OReilly, 2005; Bryant, 2007) and participatory cultures (Jenkins, 2006; Unicom,

2007) needs to be questioned with some rigour. To be clear though, I am not suggesting we
resort to the kind of cultural pessimism found in Andrew Keens (2007a) now famous polemic on the cult of the amateur, which tends toward the extreme. I am not saying that boyd and Ellison follow the marketing line but that the direction they point toward leaves us open for missing out on some key opportunities for a critical engagement with it. It is not that there is a particular problem with the direction they suggest, it is of course highly important to understand the questions they highlight, but what it is to say is that there are other questions, particularly about the workings of capitalism, that it is important that we do not overlook. Alongside this there is a pressing need to provide a strong and insightful challenge to the growing rhetoric of democratisation that has emerged and ushered in Web 2.0 (Beer & Burrows, 2007). It is to this challenge that I think we should direct our attention, and, hopefully, it is this challenge that might well come to inform the type of empirical agendas with which we will inevitably need to be engaged. So, when we ask about who are using SNS and for what purpose, we should not just think about those with profiles, we should also be thinking about capitalist interests, of third parties using the data, of the organising power of algorithms ( Lash,2007a), of the welfare issues of privacy made public, of the motives and agendas of those that construct these technologies in the common rhetoric of the day, and, finally, of the way that information is taken out of the system to inform about the users, or, in short, how SNS can be understood as archives of the everyday that represent vast and rich source of transactional data about a vast population of users. 44. In short then, when it comes to understanding SNS, its connections, its populations, its integration in how people live, what it tells us about people, how they are used, its patterns of consumption, its significance for cultural preferences, and so on, then the ordinary SNSer and the knowing capitalist are more than likely already well ahead of us. To guide our research we might take inspiration from their approaches with the SNSer living out their lives amongst the information flows on one hand and business informing itself through the routine mining, harvesting and analysis of the data on the other but we might also aim to supplement these suggestive methodologies by thinking through ways of formulating some particular, distinctive and maybe even radical dimensions to our approach. We have the opportunity at this early stage in the

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83. MANILA, Philippines -- A recent global study ranks the Philippines among countries with the highest percentage of Internet users using social networks. 84. Released by New York-based media agency Universal McCann, the study surveyed 17, 000 Internet users in 29 countries. 85. In the Philippines, the study noted 15 percent Internet penetration and estimates 37 million "active" Internet users(aged between 16 to 54), or those who go online daily or every other day. 86. The study estimates 83 percent of Internet users in the Philippines have created social network profiles, having the highest percentage ahead of Hungary (80 percent), Poland (77 percent) and Mexico (76 percent). 87. It is estimated that nearly 90 percent of users in the Philippines have Friendster accounts, although the rest of the world is either logging on to MySpace or Facebook. 88. Among the social networks mentioned, 32 percent of total Internet users log on to MySpace every week and 22 percent check their Facebook accounts. However, the study noted the popularity of social networks specific to geographical areas, like Cyworld and Mixi in Asia or Orkut in Brazil. 89. This shows that it is nearly impossible to create a single social network for the entire population of an estimated 232 million Internet users worldwide, the study said. 90. Meanwhile, the Philippines also ranks high in terms of specific usage of these social networks. The study estimates 90 percent of Filipino users read blogs, second only to South Korea (92 percent). 91. Moreover, the Philippines also has the highest percentage of users (86 percent) that have uploaded photos in these social networks, ahead of China (73 percent), Mexico (72 percent) and Brazil (70 percent). 92. The study also estimates 98 percent of Filipino Internet users have watched video on YouTube, again ranked highest ahead of Mexico and Brazil. 93. On the other hand, the Philippines was ranked a few notches lower when it comes to downloading podcasts or using RSS (real simple syndication) feeds. 94. On its third year, the Universal McCann aims to track the use of social media among Internet users worldwide. In general, this year's report showed increasing usage of social networks compared to the past two years. 95. Also, the results showed that higher usage in emerging countries than the US wherein only an estimated 43 percent of total Internet users use social networks.